Audio Feature: Alejandro Lucero (Shō No. 6)
You should talk about the field of dying alfalfa, / the golden straws that scratch your grandmother’s / legs when she returns from the river, and the fleas / jumping to her swollen ankles.
Audio Feature: T. De Los Reyes (Shō No. 6)
Dear Ryuichi, I live in a universe where / the sound of rain is your fingers tinkering / with the keys.
Audio Feature: Saida Agostini (Shō No. 6)
you beautiful beautiful stupid haunted girl / you lawless thief of daddy’s face and mummy’s grief / you daughter of the pomeroon
Audio Feature: Jackson D. Moorman (Shō No. 6)
prepared to be bare chested for the first / time in public. Fear I’ll be breaking / some cardinal rules.
Audio Feature: Monica Kim (Shō No. 5)
praise: for the sisters putting on rubber suits for each other / praise: for preparing the day’s catch with soy sauce & pan-fried onions
Audio Feature: Erica Dawson (Shō No. 6)
My excised uterus cramps with a phantom / womb’s labor pain, hard as that is to fathom.
Audio Feature: Em Townsend (Shō No. 5)
Rolling fields kiss the edges of town, farmland / lying flat and fallow like the rest of us.
Audio Feature: Susan L. Leary (Shō No. 5)
There's a certain surrender / to being an optimist—one which begins / with the day but, in fact, begins // with the evening.
Audio Feature: Robert Okaji
When I say moon, I recall brown calves lowing / at night, sheltered under their mothers' calm grace / in star-studded pastures.
Audio Feature: Melissa Fite Johnson
We’re all something else / to someone else. Maybe he became better, a person / who hated sharing a body with the person he used to be.
Audio Feature: Laura Villareal
the turkeys arrive while I’m deciphering / the if this, then that of taxes.
Audio Feature: Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer
"I was thinking a lot about human mortality and environmental catastrophe, and how we all are momentary in the world"
Audio Feature: Sophia Terazawa
One / becomes my aunt. Enter AUNT in wide / angle shots. Flickers form infinite / possibilities cast on that screen.
Audio Feature: Rebekah Wolman (Shō No. 5)
as abecedarian. Beehive. Corner cabinet, desk / detritus. Earthshine. Faultline. As gristle and gall.
Audio Feature: Mollie O’Leary
It’s true—the scene is charged / with a heat surpassing what I endured to arrive here.
Audio Feature: Luke Johnson (Shō No. 3)
“This poem is one of many calls and/or responses to the poet Megan Merchant. Our co-authored collection A Slow Indwelling comes out Fall 2024 from Harbor Editions and deals with a father and mother wrestling through cultural violence, the fragility of childhood, the preciousness of a parents love, and the beauty and pain expressed through the natural world.”
Audio Feature: Megan Merchant (Shō No. 3)
This poem is part of a larger epistolary exchange, "A Slow Indwelling", with Luke Johnson, and will be published this fall with Harbor Editions.
Audio Feature: Jeddie Sophronius (Shō No. 5)
I’m more broken than I’ve ever been. / This shell of a body, emptied / and longing.
Audio Feature: Arah Ko (Shō No. 4)
These trees war scalded from the mountains, burnt stubble, replanted when my father was a child, now tall again.